One of the things about the games is how quickly you can recover from the ton of abuse you go through. Say what you want, but the ability to have a lot of workout capacity and be able to recover helps.

Another thing that helps is a long career before of athletic activity. Take for example, x athlete and then figure how long they have been doing that and then what they were doing before that as a young'n or kid. Many of those badass crossfitters come from established athletic backgrounds before the 1 or 2 years of crossfit under their belt.

I agree with this, the recovery aspect is important. Of course you never fully recover, but doing a lot of work does help to increase you recovery abilities as long as you aren't overtraining. But that kind of training should be closer to the games for me, maybe 8 weeks out with a taper at the end. For now I may focus on olympic lifting and shorter metcons to get stronger.

But to Joe, SS is not specialized enough, and I know I'm young, but I've been training solid for five years, and for two years before that doing stupid things but exercise none the less. My goal is to compete and win in the crossfit games.
I've looked at Gant 's program, its pretty awesome but I'm not sure it's for me. I might rethink it though, we'll see. Thanks for the replies everyone